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The UK government smashed the Guardian’s hard drives in hopes of stopping the Snowden leaks

The Guardian Editor in Chief Alan Rusbridger has revealed that members of the UK Government Communications Headquarters oversaw the destruction of the newspaper’s hard drives in an effort to keep material leaked by Edward Snowden from coming to light.

Rusbridger claims that the Guardian’s reporting on the NSA will continue in spite of Whitehall’s intervention, but it will no long report on the Snowden documents from London. “Whitehall was satisfied, but it felt like a peculiarly pointless piece of symbolism that understood nothing about the digital age,” he wrote.

The revelation comes following an incident where Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald’s partner David Miranda was detained at Heathrow airport through invocation of the Terrorism Act. Miranda’s own data storage devices were confiscated during the investigation.